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It's interesting to see the comments across the Internet...some people love it, some people hate it. A lot of people misunderstand it. Some seem to irrationally fear it. People on Twitter seem to like it a lot, generally, and people on random tech webforums seem dismissive. Some people are sure it'll be the death of Free Software and a vector for malware, but I'm not sure why. And, apparently, I'm violating two patents held by Apple.

The kernel mailing list didn't completely ignore it, which I consider a victory in itself. There's been some discussion, revision, and even a competing concept introduced. Alan Cox chimed in on the thread about something unrelated to whether the idea itself is worth exploring, but that still feels like a validation to me that important people might be watching just a little bit. For a list with so much activity and good patches that don't get noticed at all, motion might be as good as progress.

I'm not really sure where it goes from here. If/when everyone is in agreement about the concept, it still needs to get into a maintainer's tree to start the journey towards Linus's git repository. Who maintains binfmt_elf? Do I just drop this thing on Andrew Morton's desk with a box of candy and a bouquet of flowers and hope for the best? The whole process is extremely intimidating to me. It's like making bargains with God. Let me pass this exam and I'll eat all my vegetables! And if I survive the stress and make it into the mainline, I get to do this again on the glibc list. And the binutils list. And the gdb list. And the FreeBSD list. And so on.

I've never gotten a response to a project like I'm getting from FatELF. It's hitting news sites all over the place, generating a lot of talk around the Web and in my inbox. It hit Slashdot and Reddit's front pages, and I watched Twitter search results change from English, to Portuguese, to French, German, Russian, hopping countries and cultures about once a day as it spreads around the planet.

I'm a little surprised that a piece of plumbing, a few hundred lines of kernel patches, generates more buzz than some of the games I've shipped.

The uncertainty of the thing is what kills me. I'd hate to find out all the effort was for nothing, but I won't know for sure until I know for sure.

The final straw was our inability to get ALSA to behave everywhere, and that many distros pipe everything through PulseAudio, even when you think you're talking to ALSA (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu!). Basically every target has quiet wrappers that push it back to other targets. With Linux 2.6.32's new CUSE module, even /dev/dsp could just be a userspace driver for whatever else. We decided that Pulse was the sanest default on modern hardware, and we find the current feature set and future roadmap for it compelling.

Add to this that Lennart Poettering, the Pulse maintainer, personally wrote the SDL PulseAudio target (and helped us with the ALSA code, too!)...Sam and I decided to give PulseAudio our vote of confidence as the default audio target for 1.2.14.

We're pretty confident that 1.2.14 is a good release and a comfortable place for the 1.2 branch to retire.

Other stuff:

Crunch time.

--ryan.

When this .plan was written: 2009-10-26 15:55:17
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